


beat inside your heart

by zinabug



Series: we're just a million miles from home [1]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Carmilla's A+ parenting, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:34:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23436256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zinabug/pseuds/zinabug
Summary: Jonny and Nastya sibling one-shots part two
Relationships: Dr Carmilla & Jonny d'Ville, Dr Carmilla & Nastya Rasputina, Jonny d'Ville & Nastya Rasputina
Series: we're just a million miles from home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1685929
Comments: 27
Kudos: 182





	beat inside your heart

**Author's Note:**

> tw: somewhat graphic self harm, implied/mentioned suicide, canon-typical levels of blood
> 
> come find me on tumblr at two-am-art and be angry at me for making you sad!
> 
> title from my friends by oh wonder! I recommend it if you would like to be sad while reading.

Jonny’s chest aches sometimes, phantom pain from a knife to the heart and needles and scalpels from Carmilla. Nastya notices it when he rubs his chest, feeling scars and a metal heart covered by a metal plate. 

Nastya’s chest hurts her. A human heart is not supposed to cycle through quicksilver instead of blood, and even though she just grits her teeth and keeps going, Jonny notices when she huddles over herself in pain. 

Carmilla was very pleased with them, her first successful mechanisms, pleased

in the way one is pleased about a painting they had completed. They were an experiment. She would grin her vicious grin of fangs when she told Nastya about how many times Jonny’s heart had failed on her, and Nastya would grip the handle of her gun and beg for her mind to let her draw it and fire. 

They just have to keep going, keep hiding and fighting and waiting. 

Nastya’s hand rubs along the notches on the handle of her gun. 

_ One for my father, one for one eyed jack. One to come for Carmilla.  _

They can’t hurt her. Jonny tried to punch her, pushing her away from Nastya, but he only hit the wall, breaking two fingers. His knuckles streamed with blood that looked too dark for a human. Nastya remembers the way it had  _ drip drip dripped  _ onto the metal floor. 

Jonny doesn’t know how he’d managed to shoot her the first time. 

He had run into the lab, finding her with her hands covered in Nastya’s quicksilver and Nasty gone. So much rage and pain - he hadn’t ever felt that much - surged through him and he just pulled the trigger. 

They could hurt her if they thought around it enough. It was just coincidence that Nastya had removed the screws to that hatch that just happened to be in Carmilla’s favorite hallway to pace in. Jonny didn’t quite  _ mean _ to fumble the knife when he handed it to her. 

But they never managed to kill her again.

The way she would look at them, especially when they managed to injure her -  _ oh, aren’t they cute, what will they try next  _ \- and they  _ knew _ they were just an experiment. 

Nastya found a crawl space, deep inside the aurora, where it was warm and quiet and safe and she dragged her bedding there, hiding from Carmilla. 

When she didn’t want to be alone, which was often, she would find Jonny and the two of them would sit in some far off corner of the ship, sometimes sleeping, sometimes singing, sometimes just existing in each other’s silence. 

Nastya’s violin playing skills returned to those of a frustrated eleven year old, hands too stiff from the cold to play anything complicated or fast. 

Jonny noticed, sang slower and easier songs, but that didn’t stop her frustration. 

_ Carmilla wants a band,  _ he’d said, when it was Carmilla who had taken away her ability to play like she used to, fast and beautiful and free, smiling without bitterness. 

Jonny showed her how to fire the gun. She had been taught fencing, and had been quite good at it, but the worn old six shooter was alien to her hands. 

Her hands would become rough and strong from doing repairs on the ship, but not yet. All she knew was that the ship’s engine sang to her, and it was fascinating and beautiful. 

When she asked Jonny about the ship he said he’d won it in a game of roulette by not being able to die despite a bullet to the brain. Carmilla had wanted it, for reasons he couldn’t name. She had told him it was alive. That was the only thing Carmilla said that Nastya could believe readily. The aurora kept her and Jonny safe, showing them hidden rooms and the quiet places where the hum of the ship was louder than the darkness in their minds. 

Carmilla never found Nastya when she hid in the ship, with or without Jonny, but she could find him when he was alone. Then Nastya would just hide herself in her loft and close her eyes and hope he was okay beyond all hopes. 

They both knew that the hiding frustrated Carmilla. Good. the only downside is that she would be angry when she found them, and that made the whole thing much, much worse. 

She wasn’t always just there to cause pain, and that was hard on Jonny. She had been kind to him once, gotten him out of a bad situation with the casino and taken him on adventures. He knew she was up to something unsavory in her lab, but he ignored it. 

And then he got stabbed, through the heart, and he knew he was going to die. 

But he didn’t. He woke up again and again in her lab, and his heart failed again and again until she got it right. 

Sometimes, she would offer a meal and they would come out of the depths of the ship like frightened animals called out by a promise of food, and she would talk and tell stories. She would be kind to them, and Nastya would be silent unless spoken too and colder than her hands. Jonny would sometimes get angry, or sometimes open up showing the soft scared person he was deep inside, under the shell of bitterness and pain. 

The one time she was alone with Nastya, Carmilla told her about Jonny. He was a good person, once, before one eyed jacks and a knife to the heart had taken so much from him. He had been kind, and he had cared. It wasn’t fully her fault that he was a cold blooded murderer, she had said, only mostly. 

She had called her Anastasia and smiled and referred to Jonny as Jonathan, had berated her for her manners as if she hadn't been starving her. Nastya chewed through her lip that day, one of scars that lingered. 

Jonny never talked about the meals he had alone with Carmilla, just handed her food smuggled away and curled up in a corner facing away from her. She didn’t ask, even if she did wonder. 

Carmilla never ate anything at these meals, just watched, calculated. 

Jonny and Nastya spent so much of their time hiding, bundled up in some corner of the ship as far away as they could get from Carmilla’s lab. Sometimes, she didn't notice they were gone for days at a time, too focused on her experiments. But she would hold out a hand for a tool to be handed to her by Jonny, and he wouldn’t be there, and she would become angry. 

Jonny would be somewhere with Nastya, her helping him write a song or Jonny listening to Nastya as she told him about the voices on the aurora. Somewhere where he could be at peace. 

The hum of the ship calmed both of them. Deep inside the Aurora, It was the only place either of them could sleep, really. Nastya was always too on guard to rest fully and Jonny did everything he could to avoid nightmares, to the point of shooting himself to just “get a fucking nights rest.” but deep inside the ship, they could truly rest. 

In those days, the only thing that hurt the mechanisms was Carmilla, and themselves. They both wore so many scars, and they didn't know why some of them faded and others would linger.

Nastya’s scars shimmered silver when she tipped her wrists back and forth in the light. She was covered in them, small cuts from the day of her death and Camilla’s bringing her back and from her own knife. 

Jonny had heavy, deep scars across his chest and back. Knife and scalpel wounds, the white starbursts of gunshots, and many of them were from him. He had a metal plate over his heart, and it was cold to the touch when he rubbed his chest, feeling his heart tick. The edges would sometimes dig into his skin and he was reminded of the metal in his chest, three ribs and a heart. 

They were in the engine room again. Jonny was cleaning under his nails with a knife while Nastya tuned her violin. She could play best in here, where it was warm and she felt safer with the hum of the aurora echoing through her chest. 

“What happened after I died?” she asked, setting the instrument down. 

Jonny startled, cutting a deep gash down the side of his pointer finger. “What?” 

“What happened after I died? I just woke up in the lab with Carmilla.” 

Jonny set down the bloody knife on the floor, watching the blood pool and drip down his hand. “You were very small, balanced on the tipping point of living and dying. A young woman in a blue dress, glasses broken, streaming blood much too fast from small cuts.” 

Nastya remembered that dress, tripping on tangled skirts to land her hands in broken glass. She rubbed the silver scars on her palms. 

“And Carmilla grinned, in that way she does, and handed you to me. Your breathing was so shallow and weak, and you were shivering. I-I told her to let you die.” Nasyta watched Jonny’s blood drip onto the metal floor. The cut was already quickly healing. 

“I wish she had.” Nastya whispered. 

“She made me carry you to her lab and even though I tried to fight her, I couldn’t and I was just holding you as you died in my arms. You saw me, blinked your eyes open in the last minutes and I told you it would be okay.” 

Nastya didn’t remember. The last thing she knew was fighting to keep her eyes open as Carmilla held out a hand soaked already soaked with her blood and pulled her towards the ship. 

“I tried to stop her, pacing through her lab and yelling as she set up her infernal machines, but she just smiled and told me what she was going to do. When I tried to physically force her to stop, she just laughed and shot me in the head. I woke up in my room on the ship, locked in.” 

Jonny grabbed the handle of the knife again and stabbed it into the floor, between two panels. Nastya flinched, but he didn’t even seem to know she was there anymore. 

“Nothing I could say, nothing I could do, and I was standing in her lab while she introduced me to you, unconscious and pale and still. The only way I knew you were alive was the heart monitor. ‘This is the lost Princess Anistasia,’ she said, smiling gleefully and I wished there was a way to get you out of there.” 

Jonny raised the knife and slammed it down again, into his hand. Nastya huddled closer to herself, afraid of his rage. 

“I swore I would be the only one.” he said. “Nobody else should have to go through this. I would have taken a hundred more years, maybe even a thousand, but eternity? Fuck this.” 

The engine room was silent, both of them watching Jonny’s blood trickle across the floor. 

“I will suffer eternity with you.” Nastya said. “I know I have no choice, but I would rather you had someone to suffer the centuries alongside you.” 

He sighed. “If Carmilla has her way, we won’t be the only one suffering eternity.” 

Nastya leaned over and pulled the knife out of his hand. “For now, we’re in this together. Let’s not think about eternity. Help me with this song.” 

Jonny’s hand healed instantly, and he picked up a sheet of paper on the ground next to him. “Well, it starts like this.” 


End file.
